That phenomenon isn’t exclusive to AI. A societal structure where a minuscule number of people amass all wealth and see themselves as gods is an inherently evil system.

Everything they do and everything they create is a means to increase their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. At the expense of the planet itself. Regulators, courts, the government, and every other institution become captured vehicles that exist to increase their wealth and power. The people are made poorer and poorer while being distracted by bread and circuses.

The only war is class war.

My understanding of the whole “being beneficial for humanity” is that:

1. It’s kind of a meme that you need to have as a silicon valley start-up. Like Google’s niw dropped “don’t be evil”.
2. If the founders and the investors, the share holder, get rich or richer, then this is already beneficial to humanity. In a net positive way similar to trickle-down-economics. At least thatvis what I think their line of thinking is.

Having said that, I think LLMs or Machine Learning can be used for useful things but I also think - as stated - the message " being beneficial for humanity" is hollow in a broader sense.

None of that started to happen until Altman overthrew the board (effectively) and now those board members that cared about that stuff are gone. Turns out the board was right about him.

Then they suddenly started helping Microsoft exclusively, which has been criticized many times for being a monopoly,

Iirc, Microsoft has 49% of it. OpenAI is having another round where it is speculated Apple will contribute along with Microsoft again.

Wasn’t Altman in charge of World Coin where he wanted everyone to scan their eyes for money to encourage a universal ID/wage?

Corporations are inherently evil.

Then they suddenly started helping Microsoft exclusively, which has been criticized many times for being a monopoly, fairly so. Having a corporate sponsor is one thing. But being exclusively in Microsoft’s pocket and helping them improve a paid AI model and series of AI services that are not exclusively and freely available to the public, yet they are getting huge amounts of funding to operate there non-profit from public sources, it seems like a scam. Unbelievable that they are allowed to do this

I don’t understand what your complaint here is. Microsoft invested a fuck ton of money into OpenAI, and OpenAI uses Azure servers to run their models. There’s nothing really nefarious there on OpenAI’s part. You can argue that Microsoft might be acting anit-competitive, in that they’re basically paying a company to use their cloud services instead of competitors, but Microsoft is still a pretty distant #2 to AWS in the Cloud, and OpenAI is not the one with obligations to not abuse their dominant market position.

If anything, OpenAI has gotten scammed out of this relationship as Microsoft engineers have gotten to work closely with them to get their models running efficiently, and now suddenly Microsoft has published very capable models in their Phi line.

But the part that’s really troubling is how they view general intelligence and the future of technology and especially AI. Sam Altman really wants to push for artificial general intelligence, that’s the goal. He wanted to be mobile so it’s accessible basically anywhere. But the thing he never mentions is how it benefits society at large. By society, I mean everyone, not just big companies but health care, wellness, well-being of the public, advancing medical technology, making food more accessible, making housing more accessible for people, improving the state of the world that we live in… None of these are concerns for Open AI

I mean, the obvious answer is the exact same as every other form of automation, from steam engines to computers. The more tasks you can automate, then the more of people’s time you free up to work on other stuff.

That and AGIs have the potential to actually surpass in ways and make discoveries and insights that would take us decades.

Open AI is basically just a scheme, a literal pyramid scheme. Users have realized that there’s a way to get easier work done in general, so they keep funding and paying for open AI services which fuels their organization. But they are not interested in doing anything beneficial or good for humanity at all. That’s pretty troubling to know.

You’re literally just describing every single software company, and quite frankly, most businesses. It’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s capitalism, which is also a pyramid scheme, but not an abnormal one.

Don’t believe that any for-profit company is altruistic, OpenAI included.

It’s pretty well known at this point, they lied about their initial goals and nothing they’ve done in ages has been “open”. It’s all been closed research that they won’t share because they don’t want anyone else to catch up.

Also they had a lot of friction with their AI safety department because caring about safety would slow down business.

OpenAI is the corpo is the very antithesis of “open”.

Actual Open-weight FOSS AI models ala Stable Diffusion or LocalLLaMa/Mistral are definitely a good thing for everyone one though for sure.

Corposhit is always evil.

making the world a better place would be aswesome, but making buttloads of money is awesomer. - sam altman, probably.